This one takes me back, I realize I never posted a video of this demo:
I had only posted screenshots here and there. This is Voxel Farm circa 2013. Two voxel years feels an eternity.
I think it still holds pretty nicely. I appreciate the asteroids surfaces have craters and other interesting variations in them. It is not just mindless noise.
Love the music in this vid, where can i get it?
ReplyDeletei miss your old procedural terrains
i really am sad that that stuff didnt make it into voxel studio release, ive been going over your blog since 2010 and seeing some old pictures such as those from "new look" apr 2012 where i can clearly see a procedural terrain tool. or reading some things you said such as "It takes less than 15 seconds to boot an entirely new world, which can be larger than Planet Earth." yet we have still use a pregenerated height map :P, i know you are just trying to create one world, but you are slowly unlocking the building block to the entire universe, and we need that infinate canvas to play on.
im really excited about your recent post named "Texture grain" and uv mapping and how it could apply itself to procedural terrain generation, and even your trees, i would like to see your old desert cliffs but using on the fly uv mapping.
definitely taking it to the next level as usual Miguel :)
The music piece is called "New Phantom" by Silent Partner. This is from YouTube's Audio Library.
DeleteAll of my old videos used a mix of pregenerated maps, back to the very first one. If you look at my posts about wang tiling, base noises, etc. the clear message is today you cannot have interesting terrain features unless you have use some form of prebaked data. It is just too complex to generate in real time. The Voxel Studio screenshot from 2012 shows how an erosion filter can be used to precompute data.
If you have access to the code or libraries, you are in a much better place to produce the old worlds you reminisce about than what I was back then. Voxel Studio allows you to define multiple biomes. The realtime libraries can combine on the fly. I wish I had something like the current Voxel Studio back then.
Also note that you are not limited to a heightmap. A single biome in Voxel Studio now is the sum of many different heightmaps applied at many different frequencies and amplitudes. While we have other systems in the pipeline, that is a very powerful tool.
These asteroids for instance also use precomputed data. It does allow a lot of variation, so each asteroid is unique, but it all works thanks of multiple layers of precomputed data. A crater impact zone is not something you can compute at spaceship flying speeds.
Don't be sad about any of this. The real drag is we live in 2015 instead of 3015. It could be worse, 1000 years ago we would have Vikings raiding instead of giving us Minecraft.